Second helpings

When reviewing games is part of your job, you frequently experience bouts of deja vu.

As I Am Vegend's zombies shuffled across the screen, right to left, and I mowed them down with pea shooters, sunflower machine guns, and explosive mines.

And I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen this all before.Plant power

I Am Vegend is a mash-up of classic tower defence strategy with intense, arcade shooter-style action.

It's also more than a little inspired by the Pocket Gamer Gold Award-winning Plants vs Zombies.

You begin the game as a lone, seed-spitting sunflower machine gun that has to defend a store of (non-shootable) seeds from a shuffling horde of zombies.

The first waves of enemies are slow-moving shufflers that won't present much of a challenge to relatively seasoned tower defenders. As the levels progress, however, the zombies step up their game by introducing zombified pig shock troops, tombstone-chucking corpses, and aerial assault undead.

Thankfully, your plucky sunflower won't have to go take on these challengers alone. As you advance you'll recruit allies, such as an area-of-effect tomato plant or pea-shooting pea plant, to add to your machine gun seed defence.Three to five servings a day

While its gameplay is solid, I Am Vegend shines most in its humour and sense of absurdity. We knew going into the game that plants and zombies weren't the best of friends, but we had no idea how much bad blood there was between the two bloodless factions.

As I Am Vegend progresses, it mixes in levels that allow you to play as dive-bombing carrots. These extra croutons of content provide a great amount of variety to the game and allow you to unwind a bit between frenetically mowing down relentless waves of the restless dead.

Unfortunately, these interludes don't take away from the fact that this game has been done before - on a number of different platforms. I Am Vegend is Plants vs Zombies with a fresh coat of someone else's paint applied

If you can look past the familiarity, though, it's worth a try. It may not be the most original game on the block, but it's a challenging and upbeat tower defence title all the same.